Spectator: The Kushner Conundrum

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After a string of broken promises, policy disappointments and sinking poll numbers, the populist wing of the Republican party knows who is to blame. It’s the President’s son-in-law, the prince of the administration, Jared Kushner.

‘Trump has a Jared problem,’ is how one conservative activist who works with the White House on immigration puts it. ‘Jared is a total frick-up. Everything he touches turns to lead.’ Others groan about ‘four more years of Jared’ should the President be re-elected in November.

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Various sources in, or connected to, the administration are stunned by the amount of power Kushner wields. He is a 39-year-old rich kid who had no experience in government before 2016, yet he is in charge of Middle East diplomacy, police reform, a major immigration reform package, criminal justice reform, PPE procurement during COVID-19 and construction of the border wall.

Kushner’s inexperience might be excusable if he were particularly brilliant. People who have sat in meetings with him, however, describe him as ‘slow’, ‘a moron’ and ‘not really that bright’. He struggles to master detail. One official suggests he doesn’t have the acuity to master one, let alone all, of the tasks the President gives him. For instance, he was in charge of producing the 600-plus-page immigration reform package, but conservatives were horrified at how little he knew about the issue he was leading on. He didn’t even seem to know what was in his own proposal; others had to step in when he was unable to answer the more technical questions.

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One conservative source who attended a briefing on the plan led by Kushner told The Spectator he was shocked that Kushner seemed to have no sense of how to answer basic questions about chain migration and the diversity visa lottery. ‘He presents as someone very knowledgeable and in the know until he faces questions,’ the source said. ‘He goes off the record or on deep background so people don’t realize he’s a fricking idiot.’

Even people close to Kushner admit he is no policy expert. In his defense, they argue that his business acumen — something even his detractors recognize — is highly useful in politics. Kushner successfully tendered contracts to build the wall, putting the administration on pace to complete 450 miles by the end of the year. The administration also boasts of Kushner’s work in assembling a volunteer team of private-sector employees to procure PPE and ventilators in the fight against COVID-19. His skill in assembling a bipartisan coalition to draft and pass the First Step Act was a widely praised success — even if some hardliners saw it as a concession to Democratic thinking on criminal justice reform.

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Some assign sinister motives to Kushner’s missteps. His negative influence on the administration, it’s whispered, goes beyond incompetence and veers toward deliberate sabotage. Several individuals close to the administration claim Kushner’s history as a rather progressive Democrat makes him far more ideological than he lets on, and this causes him to subvert Trump’s populist agenda. ‘The depths and lengths Jared is going to to stab Trump in the back [are] quite profound,’ one source claimed. ‘Trump’s been burned by Jared so many times,’ said another.


There are sour grapes here, no doubt. Kushner brings in advisers who are sympathetic to his political inclinations, often at the expense of conservative experts who aren’t. Some speak of Kushner’s ‘Greek chorus’: when Trump seeks out other counsel about a decision, he is often met with another Kushner lackey who parrots his son-in-law’s position. Kushner does seem to listen to different ideas, but conservative members of the administration have learned not to cross him. Nobody wants to end up like Steve Bannon, Gen. John Kelly or Kirstjen Nielsen. Kushner is family, so he can’t be fired.

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Kushner’s detractors, for their part, point to some trends that should alarm the Trump 2020 campaign team. Recent polls show the President’s support waning among key groups of supporters, such as evangelical Christians, white Catholics and voters without college degrees. The sense that Trump is not, after all, on their side is growing at just the wrong moment for a re-election push.

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In April, Kushner was in the fray again when Trump was considering a blanket ban on immigration amid the coronavirus outbreak. Sources familiar with the situation told The Spectator at the time that the ban was significantly stripped back because Kushner wanted to carve out exemptions for refugees, temporary workers under the H-1B visa program and farmworkers under the H-2A visa program. White House officials rejected those claims, insisting that Kushner had been ‘supportive of the President’s policy’.

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